How Nigeria fails its children

There can be no keener revelation of a society’s soul than the way in which it treats its children.- Nelson Mandela

For so many reasons, chief of which is the age of the child(ren) involved, I choose not to dwell on the specifics of the child sex video that emerged earlier this week. 

 As time goes on, I am hopeful that state authorities, operators of schools, parents, teachers, and the entire society will be honest enough to accept that this is our collective failure, nothing but an indication of our confusion as to what our society stands for. 

As a person, I would never be able to watch this video. Aside from it being immoral to watch children engage in such acts, it is also illegal. Anyone found possessing or distributing such content faces 14 years in prison, as the Lagos State Government (LASG) recently reminded.

Before the warning issued by LASG on Monday, however, many Nigerians did not seem to realise that they were fiddling with jail terms, just as the morality of the issue didn’t bother them. How many parents would want to see their underaged children in such state. Yet, people shared the video with glee and analysed it without restraint. That delinquency from adults who should know better broke my heart. Unknown to many of us, the reaction to this video is our exact attitude to many other problems that affect us and why Nigeria has become this messy.

What do I mean? 

It is immoral to watch children having sex! Period! And this has nothing to do with Nigerians’ hypocritical religious disposition; it is a global inclination, a universal hallmark for decency.

For instance, in April 2020, the Court of Appeal in the United Kingdom increased the 20-month sentence of a 38-year-old man, Haitch Macklin, by the Manchester Crown Court for possessing and distributing child pornography to four years! What happened?

The Solicitor General of the United Kingdom, Rt Hon Michael Ellis QC MP, found the judgement of the lower court “unduly lenient,” sought the intervention of the Court of Appeal.  Ellis said after the judgement: “The extent of Haitch Macklin’s involvement in this grossly abhorrent distribution of child pornography is sickening. I am pleased that the court has found his sentence unduly lenient and decided to increase it.” 

That is to show that western societies, which we imagine to be laxer with people’s sexuality, are serious about protecting children! But Nigerian adults ignored the laws and the repugnancy of this video and distributed it for hours! Could there be a better way to describe impunity?

Yet impunity, lack of consequences, disregard for such consequences and how our actions and inactions affect others, form the foundation of everything wrong with the country. People get into office and choose to become committed to the cause of their ethnic and religious group, alienate other groups, steal the country dry, and contradict everything about the constitution they swore to uphold.

Now, impunity is one thing, but it is another thing to have opportunities to rethink your ways on a platter and fail even to contemplate that. This Dubai incident should, in my opinion, cause all parents to reconsider how they are raising their children. For me, that video should assault the sensibility of every parent, and rather than bantering over it; we should be asking questions about how we got here and how we can save our society from further degeneration. 

For sure, this meditation is not because it would be the first time that pre-teens would engage in this activity, which the law does not expect them to have the capacity to comprehend, not to speak of contemplating. In this case, the children documented the event and distributed it on social media, allegedly by their own hands! So, the question that comes to mind is, do these children not know the implications of what they were doing, or did they just not care like most of us parents? Whichever one it is, we should be worried that we are building a generation that is walking down the path of impunity like we, their parents and the dangers that portends for the country.

There is a more troubling dimension to the current issue: introducing drugs! Even though this is not confirmed yet, there is the persuasion that the acts under discussion, including exposure to social media, could have been influenced by substances. But even if this incident had no drug component, the influence of drugs is a constant and present reality amongst children and young Nigerians. 

Until the award-winning Sweet, Sweet Codeine, a documentary by the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) in 2018, the Nigerian government acted as an ostrich concerning the problem that drug has become to children and youths. Before that, the Nigerian Senate had raised the alarm that about three million bottles of codeine were consumed daily in Kano and Jigawa states alone and called for speedy attention from the authorities, but nothing was done. The documentary inspired government’s knee-jerk ban on importing and producing the painkilling-turned-street-drug, but it would be surprising if things had not reverted to business as usual since.

It is true that the National Drug Law Enforcement Agency, NDLEA, has been on overdrive lately. Still, most of its activities are directed at airports and farms where the agency seizes drugs worth hundreds of millions of naira daily. little is done to limit children’s access to these substances, reclaim those who may have become entangled in the web, and generally educate Nigerians about the inherent dangers. A 2021 study on “The burden of drug abuse in Nigeria: a scoping review of epidemiological studies and drug laws,” published in Public Health Reviews, identified that: “a prevalence of 20–40% and 20.9% of drug abuse was reported among students and youths, respectively. Commonly abused drugs include cannabis, cocaine, amphetamine, heroin, diazepam, codeine, cough syrup, and tramadol. Sources, where abusers obtained drugs were pharmacies/patent medicine shops, open drug markets, drug hawkers, fellow drug abusers, friends, and drug pushers. Drug abuse was common among undergraduates and secondary school students, youths, commercial bus drivers, farmers, and sex workers….”

No wonder Nigeria is now plagued with hitherto unimaginable crimes, ranging from kidnapping, internet fraud, ritual killing, and banditry. You wonder whether this society does not see a nexus between free access to and usage of drugs and the current malaise it grapples with.

Therefore, all parents need to search their minds as to how well they discharge their responsibilities, how much time they dedicate to their children, and whether money can take the place of parental nurture. The point is also not just about what we say to children but what we do around them and the values our children association with us. And as a society, Nigeria must put an end to all forms of impunity. Starting with ensuring that anyone found negligent in issues like the one at hand is brought to book. Some laws guide the conduct of children and young people, and they should also be applied in the current instance.

Most importantly, the government and institutions in charge of the welfare and wellbeing of children must wake up from their slumber. First, is that Nigeria must strive for the compulsory education of its children. Second, the government should be interested in and must supervise the upbringing of all children because they ideally belong to this country and are its future. The seeming lack of supervision of schools, in particular, is one ill that will do Nigeria no good. At the end of it, there may be children who refuse instruction and choose that wide, wild path of deviance, but society must at least first play its role. Nigeria is currently failing on this front.